Interlude XII. Nietzsche - part 1

Apollinian & Dionysian

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XI. Foucault - part 5

Welcome to the 19th century. From here on out, green text will belong to Friedrich Nietzsche. This will prove helpful when I return to James Miller as he quotes Nietzsche more than he quotes Foucault (or so it seems to me.)

The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

Sec 1 - Apollo and Dionysus

...Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art deities of the Greeks, we come to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollinian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music. These two different tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by the common term 'art'; till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic 'will,' they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art -- Attic tragedy.

In order to grasp these two tendencies, let us first conceive of them as the separate art worlds of dreams and intoxication. These physiological phenomena present a contrast analogous to that existing between the Apollinian and the Dionysian. It was in dreams, says Lucretius, that the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men; in dreams the great shaper beheld the splendid bodies of superhuman beings; and the Hellenic poet, if questioned about the mysteries of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams....

The Apollinian.

The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is truly an artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic arts, and, as we shall see. of an important part of the poetry also. In our dreams we delight in the immediate understanding of figures; all forms speak to us; there is nothing unimportant or superfluous. But even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance: at least this is my experience...

Philosophical men even have a presentment that the reality in which we live and have our being is also mere appearance, and that another, quite different reality lies beneath it...

It is not only the agreeable and friendly images that he experiences as something universally intelligible: the serious, the troubled, the sad, the gloomy, the sudden restraints, the tricks of accident, anxious expectations, in short the whole divine comedy of life, including the inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows on a wall -- for he lives and suffers with these scenes -- and yet not without that fleeting sensation of illusion. And perhaps many will, like myself, recall how amid the dangers and terrors of dreams they have occasionally said to themselves in self-encouragement, and not without success: 'It is a dream! I will dream on!' ...

This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god... the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living...

The Dionysian.

Either under the influence of the narcotic drought, of which the songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness... There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from 'folk-diseases,' with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own 'healthy-mindedness.' But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called 'healthy-mindedness' looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, [against the Apollinian principle of individuation] but nature which has been alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man... [The Romantic and the anti-Promethean] Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or 'impudent convention' have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of māyā had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity. [My emphasis.]

In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community... he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity....

Sec 2 - The Dionysian dithyramb

...The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of music in general) is carefully excluded [from the music of Apollo] as un-Apollinian -- namely, the emotional power of the tone, the uniform flow of melody, and the utterly incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance -- the annihilation of the veil of māyā, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself... With what astonishment must the Apollinian Greek have beheld him! With an astonishment that was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was actually not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollinian consciousness which, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world from his vision.

It's a pity Nietzsche didn't live to witness the Age of Aquarius, he would have been so on-board. Re: Race, or race pride: Race would seem to be an aspect of individuation. It makes sense that a “nation” would share more in common with each other. And what they share would seem to them to also be “right.” Ironically, it requires an other for people to be aware of this racial aspect since left to themselves they would only be aware of their differences. There are other sorts of “nations” as well including religious, and cultural common interests... like this blog. I’m still a bit surprised Nietzsche gives race an almost metaphysical status.

My translation of Nietzsche prefers "Apollinian" while James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault goes with "Apollonian," which is also preferred by my spellchecker. I will use each in turn.

Sec 3 - The Olympian gods

...Whoever approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart, searching among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for disincarnate spirituality, for charity and benevolence, will soon be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. For there is nothing here that suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty. We hear nothing but the accents of an exuberant, triumphant life in which all things, whether good or evil, are deified. [“Beyond good and evil” as Nietzsche will later express it] And so the spectator may stand quite bewildered before this fantastic excess of life, asking himself by virtue of what magic potion these high-spirited men could have found life so enjoyable that, wherever they turned, their eyes beheld the smile of Helen, the ideal picture of their own existence, ‘floating in sweet sensuality...’ [We will come back to Helen in Faust.]

From SparkNotes  (they had the best summary of the Dionysian):

Nietzsche tells the story of King Midas, who finally caught the satyr Silenus and asked him what was the best of all things for man. His answer was, as Nietzsche puts it, "Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to tell you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is beyond your reach forever: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you—is quickly to die."

Dionysus offered real salvation from suffering, not by covering it up with pretty images, but by absorbing the individual into the great community of the unconscious. In the 'bosom' of Primal Unity, as Nietzsche calls it, man found deliverance from his individual fate, joined as he was to the souls of so many others. Existential suffering is a product of the individual who thinks he suffers alone, and can see no meaning in existence. Dionysus removes the veil from men's eyes, showing them the grand, dark chaos that sits in their hearts, and in the hearts of all men. Dionysus urges man to rejoice in this chaos, to lose himself, and thus to grow beyond his suffering.

It’s hard not to see a desire for “Primal Unity” in both Heidegger’s enthusiasm for Nazism and Foucault’s enthusiasm (and also in the enthusiasm of many other intellectuals who really should have known better) for Communism -- an enthusiasm Foucault renounced only because his sexuality precluded his true participation in the desired “Unity.”

...How is the world of the Olympic gods related to this folk wisdom?...

Now it is as if the Olympic magic mountain [Zauberberg] had opened before us and revealed its roots to us. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dreambirth of the Olympians. That overwhelming dismay in the face of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira [fate] enthroned inexorably over all knowledge, the vulture of the great lover of mankind, Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Oedipus, the family curse of the Atridae which drove Orestes to matricide: in short, that entire philosophy of the sylvan god, with its mythic exemplars... all this was again and again overcome by the Greeks with the aid of the Olympian middle world of art; or at any rate it was veiled and withdraws from sight. It was in order to be able to live that the Greeks had to create these gods from a most profound need... How else could this people, so sensitive, so vehement in its desires, so singularly capable of suffering, have endured existence, if it had not been revealed to them in their gods, surrounded with a higher glory?

...Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it -- the only satisfactory theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as desirable in itself, and the real pain of Homeric men is caused by parting from it, especially by early parting: so that now, reversing the wisdom of Silenus, we might say of the Greeks that ‘to die soon is worst of all for them... At the Apollinian stage of development, the ‘will’ longs so vehemently for this existence, the Homeric man feels himself so completely at one with it, that lamentation [of the loss of life] itself becomes a song of praise.

Here we should note that this harmony... this oneness of man with nature (for which Schiller introduced the technical term naïve), is by no means a simple condition that comes into being naturally and as if inevitably. It is not a condition that, like a terrestrial paradise, must necessarily be found at the gate of every culture. Only a romantic age would believe this, an age which conceived of the artist it terms of Rousseau’s Emile, reared at the bosom of nature.... [I’m surprised he doesn’t say this is an Aryan trait since the Hindu gods and goddesses are fairly similar in this respect and maybe the Norse gods as well.]

The Homeric ‘naïveté’ can be understood only as the complete victory of Apollinian illusion... In the Greeks the ‘will’ wished to contemplate itself in the transfiguration of genius and the world of art... This is the sphere of beauty, in which they saw their mirror images, the Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty the Hellenic will combated its artistically correlative talent for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering -- and as a monument of its victory, we have Homer, the naïve artist.

Next: Interlude XIII. Nietzsche - part 2 - mere appearance.